Bruins, Red Wings series reunites Team Canada's Olympic braintrust

Monday

Apr 14, 2014 at 9:27 PMApr 14, 2014 at 9:32 PM

The Bruins and Red Wings, who meet in Round 1 of the Stanley Cup playoffs, haven't met in the postseason since 1957. Since both teams' general managers and coaches recently helped lead Canada to Olympic gold, however, they're more familiar with each other than might have been expected.

Mike Loftus The Patriot Ledger

BOSTON – These guys seem awfully familiar – like, way more familiar than most people would know or expect.

Sure, it’s because the Bruins and Red Wings were placed in the same division this year and faced each other four times during the regular season – as many times as they’d seen each other in the previous four years combined. They just played each other two weeks ago, in fact.

There’s more to it than that, though. Less than two months ago, the brain trusts of the Bruins and Red Wings, who open Round 1 of their best-of-7 playoff series on Friday night at TD Garden, pooled their knowledge, theory and opinion to game-plan Team Canada to its second consecutive Olympic gold medal.

“I was thinking about that this morning,” Bruins general manager Peter Chiarelli said on Monday at his pre-series press conference. “I had to put a call in to (Wings GM) Kenny Holland on a couple of things. We were kind of partners in crime last time and now we’re competitors.”

Chiarelli and Holland had much to do with constructing Canada’s roster. Mike Babcock, Detroit’s coach, was Canada’s head coach, and the Bruins’ Claude Julien was one of his assistants.

From discussing ways to attack an opponent, whether by using a particular system or keying on individual players, there weren’t any secrets.

“In order for us to be successful with the Canadian team, we couldn’t hold back information,” Julien said Sunday in New Jersey, the morning after learning the B’s and Wings would meet in Round 1.

“We had to be open. We made that promise, made that deal that we would be as open as we could ever be … for the right reasons.”

If anything, Babcock had to give up more. Six of his players were named to Team Sweden and four of them – plus Boston’s Loui Eriksson – played in the gold medal game against Canada.

Then again, if Team Canada wanted a scouting report on Finnish goalie Tuukka Rask in the qualification round, Rask’s coach in Boston had to be the go-to guy. And chances are pretty good that Julien and Chiarelli both cited all the ways Bruins center Patrice Bergeron could (and did) help Canada’s cause.

“In that environment,” Chiarelli said, “it’s like you kind of bare all because you want to win.”

Julien and Babcock spoke when they could about players before Canada’s roster was announced and there was presumably plenty of brainstorming during the tournament in Sochi, Russia. But the Bruins’ coach said the possibility of facing each other in the playoffs never came up.

“No, not at all,” Julien said. “Even the last time we played (April 2 at Detroit, where the Wings ended the Bruins’ 15-0-1 unbeaten-in-regulation streak), we talked, but we didn’t talk about it at all.

“I’ve congratulated (Babcock) on making the playoffs and he just congratulated me on winning the Presidents’ Cup. But we haven’t talked about playing each other and we probably won’t.”

The prevailing opinion is that, with every team employing pro scouts, every NHL game televised, every team using some type of video coordinator, little about an NHL foe isn’t already widely known.

Julien, therefore, probably didn’t leave Sochi with inside information about the Red Wings’ Swedish contingent of forwards Henrik Zetterberg (who played only once in the Olympics and still hasn’t returned from a back injury), Johan Franzen and Daniel Alferedsson, defensemen Niklas Kronwall and Jonathan Ericsson or goalie Jonas Gustavsson, who backed up Henrik Lundqvist in Sochi and plays behind Jimmy Howard in Detroit. Babcock, it’s safe to say, already knew what Bergeron, Rask and Eriksson were all about.

“There’s never any secrets any more … because of video, watching teams play, all that stuff,” Julien said. “You don’t hide much.

“If there is a little bit of an edge, we both have it. It’s not that one has it and the other one doesn’t.”

All that said, there’s certainly more familiarity here than would be expected of teams that faced each other so infrequently before the NHL realigned its conferences and divisions this season and which haven’t met in the playoffs since 1957.

“We’ll both know each other really well,” Julien said. “We’ll both know our tendencies because of how we worked together. That’s about it.

“It’ll be an interesting series.”

Mike Loftus may be reached at mloftus@ledger.com. On Twitter.com: @MLoftus_Ledger.